Personal growth: The need for self-tolerance March 6, 2014

One of the important aspects of moving towards the achievement of our personal development potential is in focusing on the vector of developing mature interpersonal relationships.

This is a multi-faceted area for improvement, and we recognize that one of the important aspects of this component is the need for personal work on the subset of developing the character attribute of tolerance.

In our ongoing self-improvement work we have learned some important value lessons.

We recognize that one aspect of intolerance is the pejorative naming, labelling, and categorizing of people, groups of people, institutions, religions, nationalities, races, sexual orientation, and political views.

We know, for example, that naming, labelling, and categorizing often allows us to over-simplify the complex.

We know that it is both morally wrong, and ultimately unproductive, to be intolerant, bigoted, or judgemental, and we work to correct these tendencies in our own personal makeup.

But how often do we see that there is also need for us, if we are to realize our individual human potential, to be more tolerant towards ourselves in our personal development work?

Personal growth is just that – growth. By implication, growth is not achieved overnight, it is an evolutionary process. We should not be beating ourselves up constantly for not achieving sufficiently rapid improvement in areas such as attitudinal change. Attitude modification is one of the most challenging components of self-improvement.

We should be more accepting and tolerant of what we consider to be our own, personal attitudinal shortcomings, even as we recognize the need for improving these deficiencies in our intellectual and emotional makeup.